Remembering a friend: Dario Lodigiani

From SABR member Ev Parker at the Napa Valley Register on February 11, 2012:

Four years ago this very Saturday, at St. Apollinaris Church in north Napa, it seemed that the entire North Bay Area turned out to express their sympathy and affection on the passing of a stand-up guy and dear friend.

Memories return of a casket covered with an American flag that was wheeled into church while Paul McKeever, the church organist, played our national anthem, the same beautiful and inspiring song played before every Major League and minor-league baseball game across this great land.

My dear friend Dario Lodigiani would receive his last hurrahs, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the pews that day; but memories of a good and humble man remain forever.

When this scribe and new citizen of old Napa town arrived in 1997, the Society for American Baseball Research, of which I’m a member, came up with a request from the Oral History Committee.

I was asked to locate a man named Dario Lodigiani, if possible, and tape an interview about the game through Dario’s eyes and memories.